Posts tagged as “Column of the Day”

Whatever the long-term military consequences of the war in Gaza, its effect on the American public’s support for Israel has been catastrophic and won’t be reversed quickly.

For the first time since Gallup began measuring attitudes on this matter a quarter-century ago, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with the Israelis.

The decline isn’t limited to young Americans, who favor the Palestinians by 53% to 23%. The shift among 35- to 54-year-olds has been even sharper. 

● Read in The Wall Street Journal

● Read here on The Red Line

Blue-state and blue-city voters pay higher taxes. Blue states and cities often also pay state and local government workers more than similar jobs pay in red jurisdictions, even after adjusting for the cost of living.

Much of this gap is tied up in pension benefits. Workers generally value higher wages today. But pensions are attractive to politicians who pass future costs to future taxpayers.

The question is whether one segment of workers should retire with greater security than others, at the expense of services that the public depends on.

Read more here on The Red Line

The Democrats’ lurch to the left is accelerating at warp speed — and Connecticut is the latest victim.

The state legislature’s Democrat supermajority last week rammed through a hosing bill that’s a thinly disguised socialist wishlist.

● Read in New York Post

● Read here on The Red Line

What we call the “gig economy” is, in practice, a debt-and-fear economy — one that goes unchallenged in hyper-progressive places like NYC precisely because liberals have redefined “compassion” as ignoring the law.

● Read in Private Wires

● Read here on The Red Line

Connecticut is again poised to take a costly step deeper into the business of health care.

On Oct. 14, the CT Mirror reported the state is preparing to borrow nearly $390 million to allow UConn Health to purchase Waterbury Hospital from Prospect Medical Holdings, a bankrupt private operator.

● Read at Yankee Institute

● Read here on The Red Line

In 2023 computer hackers stole $6 million from the New Haven school system and city government fired the system’s information technology director over it. ...the other day a labor arbitrator ruled that the theft wasn’t the fault of the information technology director and that she must be returned to her job with back pay, which may amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Mayor Justin Elicker said he was “disappointed” by the arbitrator’s decision and still believes that the firing was justified.

But the mayor can’t be too disappointed. If he really thought the employee is culpable and her reinstatement is wrong, he might be questioning the state law and the city’s contracts with its unions that give government employees the right to binding arbitration of personnel decisions and well as binding arbitration of union contracts themselves.

After all, the public elects mayors and school board members to administer the government. The public doesn’t elect arbitrators.

● Read in Hearst CT Newspapers

● Read here on The Red Line

At the heart of this concern is the sheer scale of exposure, both domestic and international, to American equities. This growing interconnectedness means that any sharp downturn in American markets will reverberate around the world.

● Read in The Economist

● Read here on The Red Line

Inside Investigator submitted a Freedom of Information request to the state Comptroller’s office for all full-time executive branch employees with mailing addresses outside the state of Connecticut and received back 505 names, with town and state data.

By far, most of those employees (442) live in Connecticut’s next door neighbor states.

In some cases, the data was just wrong... one manager who lived in Florida had actually retired... Others had retired,.. but have since returned to state service as a temporary worker/retiree and maintain residence in-state. Others were seasonal employees or substitute teachers who only worked occasionally...

For the remaining full-time, active employees who had out of state mailing addresses – of which there were thirteen – they were nearly all long-time employees, making over six figures, and working in IT or a similarly computer-based role.

Of about 340 million Americans, 83 million are on Medicaid.

That’s one-fourth of us.

Forty percent of American children are on Medicaid. Forty percent!

Try to wrap your head around those figures. One in four of us has his healthcare paid for by the other three, who are also paying for their own healthcare. Two of every five children in the country have been brought into the world by people who are not in a condition to provide them healthcare, so the rest of us pick up the tab, in addition to paying for the healthcare of our own
 children.

● Read in Chronicles

● Read here on The Red Line